The Art of Liberal-Speak. Making up words and terms to suit your fancy.
Not a single day goes by when I don’t find some manifestation for more admiration of American Liberals. High on the list is their ability and propensity to make up fancy, warm and fuzzy terms and labels for their loony ideas.
Most recently, my amazement reached a new pinnacle. Barack Obama, in a fit of foreign policy stupidity worth of Bill Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Halfbright created a war from thin air by attacking Libya and endeavoring to kill its Leader, Colonel Qaddaffi. However, because liberals abhor war Obama choose a new term to replace the tired, worn out, and abused term. Instead of “war” in Libya the United States and its allies engaged in “kinetic military action”.
God how I love these people. Just when you think they have reached the pinnacle of total absurdity and hypocrisy they take us to new heights. I especially love observing the antics and verbal gymnastics of the liberal “anti-war” voting bloc while they embrace new terms like “kinetic military action”. Even given a glorious past this one fits into the top ten.
Speaking of the glorious past let’s revisit some historical great language abuses.
1. Imagine yourself back at the dawn of modern democrat policies. Remember those great days when democrats enthusiastically embraced the ideas of the socialists of their time? Yeh, those were great times for democrats. Except back then they were not called “liberals” because the term still had its historical meaning. Back then they liked to be called “progressives”. Whatever.
So take yourself back to the days of Franklin Roosevelt when he and his buddies decided to implement the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history. Under the program, money is confiscated from working people by taking it directly from an employer in the form of “payroll taxes”. (This way, the worker never gets to see the money and is less likely to realize how much is being stolen from him/her.) The government takes money from working people during their prime earning years and then gives the money to people who are no longer working. The recipients are called “retired workers“.
Of course, this program started out stealing very small amounts of money from workers but that didn’t last long. Also, at the start the confiscated money was held and “invested” by the government. (But that practice did not survive long before the democrats decided to go ahead and spend the money on whatever they wanted.)
The original “retirement age” was set high enough so that few people if any would ever see any significant benefits. However, after the second world war despite government attempts to keep life expectancy down by encouraging tobacco and cigarette sales with subsidies people started living too long. This meant that in order to keep the Ponzi scheme going the democrats had to confiscate larger and larger sums of money from people with jobs so the payouts to “retired workers” could continue. In fact, at the same time they increased the amount of the “payroll taxes” they upped the payouts. Boy I tell you, those democrats sure are good friends to “the working man” don’t you think?
So there you were talking to Franklin Roosevelt about this scheme and wondering how to sell it to anyone with a functioning brain. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s give it a warm and fuzzy name that conjures up positive emotional reactions. Let’s call it “Social Security”. Wow. What a way to sell an idea that would be illegal if any private person tried it. (Have you heard of Bernie Madoff?) Social Security. Warm, fuzzy, nice. Also, the biggest financial scam in the history of the world.
2. Years passed before the “progressives” (now calling themselves “liberals”) came up with another really bad idea for social experimentation. After WW II they realized that their overwhelming urge to direct personal behavior and social evolution according to their designs necessitated far more influence over people’s lives and choices. Being the clever schemers that they are the liberals knew they needed to control access to health care. Enter the great liberal Lyndon Johnson (who also brought us the wonderful years of the Vietnam War). He pushed the liberal agenda hard but rather than having it seen as a series of new boneheaded notions he gave it a new name. Thus was born the “Great Society”.
Principal among the “Great Society” ideas is the control of access to health care. Do you remember the days (I was a wee child) when you could go to the Doctor, get treated, and then pay a fair fee for the service? Doctors and other health care professionals were prosperous members of the community who worked in private clinics and made a good living. Hospital rooms cost $60.00 to $100.00 per night. The system worked good and Americans were healthy.
But this system did not fit well with the liberal agenda of greater and greater social control and dominance over personal decisions and choices. They realized they could start by controlling health care access by citizens who really need a doctor. So, they focused on health care for the elderly (the same “retired workers” who were already collecting the “social security” money confiscated from everyone with a job.) Lyndon Johnson and his cronies brought forth “Medicare”. (They also birthed a slew of other stupid ideas, like expensive income redistribution in the form of welfare payments that they called “Aid to Families with Dependent Children”. More on that later.)
Medicare created a huge new tax on everyone who had a job (another payroll tax) and an enormous bureaucracy of civil servants and soon to be overpaid unionized government workers. These people realized the need to control the cost of government paid health insurance so they developed special systems to determine how much health care services should cost. They developed complex coding systems to cover all the supplies and services patients received. They brought forth the coding system of payment for health services that was soon adopted by all insurance companies. This is the wonderful innovation that created hospital bills that are hundreds of pages long, full of cryptic codes and descriptions that no patient can ever understand, and indecipherable without a computer and the proper software. Along the way, this system made every doctor, clinic, and hospital a piece worker who was paid based upon each minute supply or service rendered, with no regard for the quality of care or successful outcomes. Medicare and its bureaucrats gradually and purposefully drove up the cost of health care to the point where we now decry exorbitant overcharging while the liberals chant the mantra of more government control. There really in no limit to the extent liberals are driven to screw things up.
But you know, it has such a soft and cuddly name. Medicare. Don’t you like the way it slides off the tongue? Medicare has done more to destroy access to health care in America, by driving up costs and prices, than any other single thing. Such nice people these liberals.
3. I mentioned above a program called “Aid to Families with Dependant Children” (AFDC). That’s liberal-speak for welfare. So let’s look at that. This program was also part of the “great society” and it quickly evolved into transfer payments to any family (with children) whose income was below the “poverty level”. The word “poverty” entered into our lexicon as liberals mounted their “war on poverty”. This meant they would take more money from people with jobs and give it to an entirely new group of people who did not work. Of course, the liberals couched this whole thing in another of their favorite mantras, that is, “do it for the children”.
AFDC quickly ballooned toward the moon. It created another new bureaucracy of over-paid numbskulls and they quickly implemented a slew of stupid conditions and restrictions. For example, families without a husband or father present got more money. Families with more children got more money. Along with the money came government housing in government run ghettos. In short order AFDC successfully encouraged teen pregnancy, births out of wedlock, and destruction of families (because if a father was present less money was paid). This baloney lasted until Bill Clinton finally signed a bill to end the nonsense during republican congressional control in the 1990’s. In the meantime, the government tore down the enormous ghettos of public housing that were built in the 1960’s. (By the way, the liberals called tearing down the ghettos by another cute term, “Urban Renewal”. Really, there is no end to this crap.)
4. Not long after Lyndon Johnson along came another mind-numbed moron, our worst president until Barack Obama, a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter. Jimmy had a really bad idea. He and his gang thought that banks should lend money to people who could not afford to pay it back so they could buy homes. Instead of calling it “forcing lenders to make dumb loans” they called it the “Community Reinvestment Act”. Sounds sweet doesn’t it? So, beginning with Jimmy Carter, American banks were gradually forced to loan more and more money to people who could not pay it back. This program took a while to really get going since lenders never like to lend money to people who can’t pay it back. Its kind of bad for the banking business. But then along came Bill Clinton in the 1990’s.
Bill and his economic team from Goldman Sachs decided that the way to encourage banks to lend money to people who can’t pay it back was to find someone to buy the loans from the banks after the money was lent. Clinton and the gang decided to force the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) to buy the loans from the banks. FNMA is a “Government Sponsored Corporation” (GSC) with private shareholders, created by, you guessed it, Franklin Roosevelt. It borrowed private money by selling bonds to private investors, then bought mortgages from banks and used the interest income from the mortgages to pay interest to its bondholders. The bondholders would accept lower interest on their bonds because it was always implied that the federal government stood behind FNMA and would make good when it finally went bust. (That happened in 2008.)
Boy was this dumb idea successful. FNMA got into the business of buying bad home mortgages and pretty soon Wall Street geniuses figured out everyone should get in on the game. Banks started making worse and worse loans to more and more deadbeats and the boys and girls on Wall Street then packaged loans together and resold them to suckers all over the world. (Rather than call these loans some descriptive term like “dog shit loans that will never be repaid” they used the term “sub-prime loans”.)
The price of houses skyrocketed but eventually the house of cards collapsed. Investors lost billions of dollars, taxpayers picked up the tab at FNMA, and the depression (still ongoing) of 2008 hit like a ton of bricks.
So here we have it. “Social Security” is a fancy name for a government sponsored, mandatory participation Ponzi scheme. “Medicare” is an incremental government take over of health insurance and health care access that is ongoing and destroying affordable access to private health care. AFDC died a painful death in the 1990’s after inflicting incredible harm all across the nation. The “Community Re-Investment Act” directly lead to the series of events that produced the most damaging economic collapse in American history (still ongoing).
But they all have such nice names don’t you think?
I think we need to thank our liberal friends for their creative use of the English language. But why stop here? Let’s really have some fun. Here are some more warm and cuddly ways to re-define and re-label things no one really wants.
1. Burglary. What an awful term. It just stigmatizes and stereotypes a large group of free thinking jobless people. I think we should not use the term “burglary” any longer. How about, “unauthorized possession and removal of property”?
2. Unemployed person. Another stereotype. We should stop calling people without jobs “unemployed”. Let’s call them “occupationally handicapped”. Since they are handicapped we can pay them some social security money, buy them health insurance, pay their rent, and give them free medical marijuana. Isn’t that a nice idea?
3. Teen Pregnancy. What an awful term. I think we should say instead, “prospective adult carrying a future taxpayer”.
4. Disabled person. These folks used to be “handicapped” but that was too broad so liberals insisted on the term “disabled”. But I think we still need more compassion. Instead, let’s all say, “differently gifted person”.
5. Special needs child. We used to call these folks retarded. But that is so cold. But “special needs” isn’t much better. What’s so special about the needs of a retarded person? I think we should refer to these persons as “bi-intelligent”.
6. Gay men. This took the place of “homo-sexual”, “homo”, “fag”, and a host of other terms of a derogatory nature. But what’s so “gay” about anal sex? I don’t get it. I think we should instead say “wrong hole guys”.
7. Illegal Aliens. This one implies that someone who breaks the law to enter this country has done something illegal. It makes it sound that folks who break the law to enter this country are from another planet. That’s really not fair. Liberals want to call these folks, “undocumented immigrants”. But what’s that all about? I think we should call them “non-English language workers from elsewhere”.
8. Drug addicts. Give me a break. Just because someone likes to use illegal drugs and steals from others to get money doesn’t mean they deserve a derogatory label like “addict”. Let’s call them “brain chemistry disadvantaged”.
9. Drunk drivers. This implies that drunk people can drive when in fact everyone knows that anyone who is drunk is a crappy driver. Why should we perpetuate a myth? I think from now on there we should call them “impulse distorted and impaired auto operators”.
10. Child molesters. Ok, I guess I can’t think up a warm and fuzzy name for child molesters. I will ask one of my liberal friends for help. I know they will think of something. In the meantime, let’s just call them “dirt bags who should be shot without warning”.
So that’s it. I could go on and on but no matter how hard I try I know I will never be able to adequately provide truly great labels and slogans as done by the liberals who walk among us. Like so many other Americans I can’t compete in the world of liberal linguistic bullshit. We just prefer the truth.
caughtinavortex 